Vista and Miss Militia wore armbands. Golem had the emblem marked out on one bicep.

“It’s good to see you, Victoria,” Miss Militia said. “Long time.”

“Long time,” I said. “Wish it was under better circumstances.”

“I’m glad you’re doing as well as you are,” she told me. She turned her head. “You too, Tress.”

The comment to Tress sounded like it had come from further away. Ever since my run-in with Engel had… I wasn’t even sure how to put it. I hadn’t been at rock bottom, only for something to reach up from below and drag me further down, but I’d been reminded what that something reaching up had felt like, and that had shaken things loose. I’d remembered small details that had previously been hidden away under the cloak of altered memories, and slivers and fragments of those memories kept coming up to the surface. Now one loomed, like a threatening person in my peripheral vision. I ignored it.

“Have you talked to the mayor?” Miss Militia asked.

“No,” I told her. “Should we?”

“We tried and her phone line is busy. We sent someone over to have a chat with her.”

She met my eyes. That vague shadow loomed closer, and I looked away.

“I have no idea if we did the right thing,” I said. “It didn’t feel right, defending her.”

“In terms of maintaining the peace overall, it may have been best,” Miss Militia said. “But people like her have a way of making others make those compromises on their behalf. Be careful.”

I couldn’t quite bring myself to meet her eyes again, which annoyed me. I wanted to sound confident and I wasn’t confident, but it was for completely different reasons than she was likely to expect.

It wasn’t like Sveta where she got stuff in dreams and then digested it over the course of the day. It was a more haunting, incoherent edge to thoughts, where I started thinking about negative things and got into vaguer territory where I couldn’t place faces or line up events, but where the negative emotion was ooze-thick.

Miss Militia had been there.

“Miss Militia was kind enough to explain things while we walked over,” Natalie said. “I’m not sure what my role in this is. It’s not criminal law, and criminal law has… kind of ceased to apply to supervillains, as far as I can tell.”

“It applies,” Golem said. “But it applies in a narrow window between the threats and chronic offenders we have to take severe action against, and the moderate to minor offenders who get off with slaps on the wrist because the courts don’t have the resources to process them.”

“But this isn’t that,” Natalie said. “You want me to be a secretary.”